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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24243910">Tell Me What You Want</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhysiana/pseuds/rhysiana'>rhysiana</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Teen Wolf (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Getting Back Together, In Which Peter's Reputation Is Misleading, In Which the Author Enjoys Taking a Contrary Stance and Running With It, M/M, Touch-Starved</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 20:29:27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,053</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24243910</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhysiana/pseuds/rhysiana</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>It happened again a few weeks later. A different bar, a different drink, and this time a guy dressed in try-hard motorcycle leathers bragging to a friend about the last time Peter had picked him up and wondering why he hadn’t seen him around lately. </p>
<p>Chris didn’t even finish his drink before leaving. </p>
<p>Apparently Peter was known all over town as the go-to guy for uncomplicated rough-and-tumble one-night stands, a thought that made Chris twitch but shrug it off. </p>
<p>However, it seemed Peter also hadn’t been seen in his usual haunts for weeks by anyone, not just the pack, and that was enough to finally make Chris go from twitchy to doing something about it.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>In which post-resurrection Peter appears to have earned himself quite a reputation around town, and Chris is the only one who knows it isn't real.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Chris Argent/Peter Hale</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>38</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>299</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Tell Me What You Want</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Many thanks to gendzl for the beta when I couldn't see repetitive words in this anymore!</p>
<p>Blame to srprincess, for abetting this nonsense when she knows full well I have 800 other WIPs I should have been working on instead.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The thing that most confused Chris about Beacon Hills some days was how so few people seemed to be in the know about the supernatural. Or rather, how so few <em>adults</em> seemed to be in the know. What he wouldn’t give to be able to go out after a pack meeting and get a drink with someone he could just toast in understanding silence. (Who wasn’t a recovering alcoholic. Stiles’ glares after he heard his dad talking about the <em>one time</em> the sheriff had gone out with Chris had been enough to dissuade him from inviting the man again.)</p>
<p>There was Melissa, of course, but she was so often on call that it seemed cruel to try to take her out for anything other than coffee, and that just left him with Peter—a choice with an entirely different set of baggage. But Chris was desperate enough for companionship tonight that he would have invited Peter anyway, if he’d been there.</p>
<p>He was frowning at that thought over his whiskey when he heard from behind him: “What I wouldn’t give to find Peter Hale here tonight.”</p>
<p>“God, right? Sometimes you just need a little uncomplicated something-something with a guy who can hold you up against a wall.”</p>
<p>“And that, like, caveman sort of growling thing he does? Hot.”</p>
<p>That didn’t really sound like the Peter Chris remembered, the boy who’d cared either intensely or not at all, who wouldn’t have known a casual relationship if it’d been handed to him on a platter, but what did he know about Peter anymore? He finished his whiskey, paid his tab, and went home.</p><hr/>
<p>It happened again a few weeks later. A different bar, a different drink, and this time a guy dressed in try-hard motorcycle leathers bragging to a friend about the last time Peter had picked him up and wondering why he hadn’t seen him around lately.</p>
<p>Chris didn’t even finish his drink before leaving.</p>
<p>Apparently Peter was known all over town as the go-to guy for uncomplicated rough-and-tumble one-night stands, a thought that made Chris twitch but shrug it off.</p>
<p>However, it seemed Peter also hadn’t been seen in his usual haunts for weeks by anyone, not just the pack, and <em>that</em> was enough to finally make Chris go from twitchy to doing something about it.</p><hr/>
<p>Peter answered the door in sweatpants, a shirt that was only showing off his neck because it was stretched out and shapeless rather than intentionally provocative, and hair that hadn’t been styled in days. Chris had seen him look more put together while actively fighting off a mutated swamp creature.</p>
<p>Peter narrowed his eyes at the sight of him. “What do you need?”</p>
<p>Chris held up his hands in protest. “I just wanted to check on you.” He narrowed his eyes right back. “And you look awful. What do <em>you</em> need?”</p>
<p>“Nothing,” Peter bit out, and tried to shut the door, but Chris already had his arm out to block it and Peter didn’t bother to try to counter him.</p>
<p>Chris was now <em>deeply</em> concerned.</p>
<p>“What’s wrong with you?” he asked.</p>
<p>“Go away,” Peter said, heading back into the apartment.</p>
<p>Chris reached out and caught Peter’s wrist on impulse, not willing to let him walk away from a discussion he clearly needed to have, and Peter froze. Chris was so surprised that he froze right along with him, but then he took in Peter’s held breath and his clenched fist and how he very, very carefully wasn’t moving, and he understood.</p>
<p>Stepping forward and around Peter, never letting go of his wrist and more than half convinced he was about to do something very, very stupid, he pulled Peter into a full hug. “Why are you doing this to yourself?”</p>
<p>It lasted just long enough for Chris to wonder if Peter was actually going to allow this to happen, but then Peter shoved him away. “I’m not doing anything to myself. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”</p>
<p>“You haven’t been at pack meetings for over a month. Tell me you’ve been meeting up with Derek at other times. Tell me you haven’t been isolating yourself from your pack. Tell me truthfully, and I’ll go.”</p>
<p>Peter gave a ghost of his trademark sneer. “What pack do I have to be part of?”</p>
<p>Chris blinked. “Well… I… Derek,” he trailed off with a useless vague gesture.</p>
<p>“The paltry remnants of our family pack bond is enough to keep me from losing myself, but that is hardly the same as having a pack,” Peter said scathingly. He turned away again and continued into his living room, where there was what looked suspiciously like a nest of blankets on the couch. The coffee table in front of it was covered in papers.</p>
<p>Chris glanced at them out of habit, and then looked closer. “Why are you researching other packs? Is there a threat coming from… South Dakota?” That seemed unlikely. Chris hadn’t heard even a hint of trouble from that direction.</p>
<p>Peter bent to gather the scattered mess into a pile. “No. This is none of your business.”</p>
<p>“Threats to this town are my business.”</p>
<p>Peter straightened up and glared. “I’m looking for somewhere to move, all right? Somewhere far away, with a pack that doesn’t mind taking in auxiliary members.”</p>
<p>Chris digested that in silence for a moment, pushing aside his own feelings at the news. They weren’t relevant here. “You’d be better off looking at the big cities, then. New York. Paris. London. They’ll be used to new people coming and going.”</p>
<p>“I’m aware of that.” Some of the tension left Peter’s shoulders. “You’re not going to tell me I should stay?”</p>
<p>Chris shrugged, aiming for casual and hoping he hit it. “It’s your life.”</p>
<p>Peter snorted. “If you can call this living. I’m just… surviving.”</p>
<p>“And that’s why you’ve been denying yourself contact with the people who should be your pack, sleeping your way through every bar in town to compensate?” Chris shot back, suddenly furiously angry at everyone involved in this situation, including himself.</p>
<p>Peter’s eyes widened and then he smirked. “Is <em>that</em> what you’re mad about, Christopher? You’re jealous? All you had to do was ask.”</p>
<p>“Don’t do that,” Chris said flatly.</p>
<p>Peter took a step toward him, overtly flirtatious now. “Do what?”</p>
<p>“This fake come-on shit.”</p>
<p>Peter had gotten close enough to lean in and ghost his lips up the side of Chris’s neck. Chris leaned away.</p>
<p>“Who says this is fake, Christopher? You know I’ve always liked you.”</p>
<p>“Stop it.” Chris stepped to the other side of the coffee table and crossed his arms. “I know touch-starvation messes with your control, but just say so. Ask me for help. Don’t pretend to seduce me. Don’t <em>lie</em> to me.” <em>Of all people</em> hung in the air between them at the end of his sentence, twenty years of things they hadn’t talked about and wouldn’t address now either.</p>
<p>Peter closed his eyes and shuddered, then dropped back down onto the couch like his strings had been cut. “I’m just so tired.”</p>
<p>Cautiously, Chris took the other end of the couch. “How long has it been?”</p>
<p>“A few weeks, I guess. Going out started to seem like too much of an effort, which is when I started this.” Peter waved an exhausted hand at the coffee table.</p>
<p>“How can I help?”</p>
<p>Peter opened his eyes and turned a speculative leer in Chris’s direction.</p>
<p>“No.”</p>
<p>“You just said you wanted to help.”</p>
<p>“I want you to tell me what you want. What you <em>need</em>.”</p>
<p>“Are you saying you don’t want me to hold you down and tell you you’re a good boy?”</p>
<p>Chris kept his face determinedly neutral. “I’m saying I never knew you to want that before.”</p>
<p>Peter looked away. “What do you know? I spent a long time in that coma.”</p>
<p>Chris nodded. “That’s true. I guess I really don’t know you that well anymore.” He put his hands on his knees and prepared to stand up, but Peter caught his wrist before he could even finish shifting his weight forward.</p>
<p>“Don’t.” There wasn’t a trace of a leer on Peter’s face this time. “Don’t leave. I can’t… I’m about to crawl out of my skin right now. Just touch me. Please. Touch me.”</p>
<p>Chris immediately hauled him across the couch so Peter could bury his face in the side of Chris’s neck. He slid one hand up the back of Peter’s shirt. When he started using the other one to comb through the hair at the nape of Peter’s neck, Peter lost the rest of his tension in one long, shuddering sigh.</p>
<p>“It shouldn’t have gotten this bad,” Chris whispered.</p>
<p>Peter shrugged ever so slightly against his chest. “Who else would even know?” he asked rhetorically, echoing Chris’s thoughts about the strange unevenness of supernatural knowledge in Beacon Hills.</p>
<p>“<em>I</em> know,” he said with a pointed jostle, and then grunted as he sank further into the couch. “You’re much heavier than the last time we did this.”</p>
<p>“Just what are you implying?” Peter asked in a pale imitation of his usual snark.</p>
<p>“I’m implying I can’t carry you to bed anymore, so you’re going to have to get up.”</p>
<p>Peter tensed against him.</p>
<p>“I’m not leaving. I just think this would be more comfortable somewhere other than this couch.”</p>
<p>Peter unwound himself from Chris’s lap slowly, running a hand through Chris’s hair as he drew back. “You got old.”</p>
<p>Chris suddenly felt every single one of those years, down to his bones. “I did.” He looked up at Peter with no pretense between them, finally. “You’re not the only one who’s tired of surviving. Let’s go to bed.”</p><hr/>
<p>He stripped off Peter’s shirt on their way down the hall and told himself it was in the interests of efficiency. (He’d stop lying to himself any minute now, he was sure.) Peter shuddered at the pass of Chris’s hands over his ribs and leaned toward him like a plant toward the sun, not even bothering to hide it.</p>
<p>Chris pushed him toward the bed as soon as they were in Peter’s room and bent to untie his boots. There was a chair in the corner, so he lined the boots up neatly beside it, then laid his folded jacket over the back. When he reached back to pull off his own shirt, though, he found Peter frozen in place on the edge of the bed.</p>
<p>“What?”</p>
<p>“You’re really staying.”</p>
<p>Chris finished pulling off his shirt and laid it on top of his jacket. “Yes? I said I would.”</p>
<p>“Why are you doing this?”</p>
<p>It wasn’t like Chris hadn’t asked himself the same question. He had no interest in examining the answer too closely, though. “Because I can,” he said instead. And with that, he shucked off his jeans and headed resolutely for the bed.</p>
<p>Peter remained where he was as Chris pulled back the covers and punched a few pillows into a more comfortable arrangement behind him.</p>
<p>“Well?” Chris asked with a raised eyebrow. “Are you going to take off your pants and get in here with me or not? Don’t defeat the entire purpose of the exercise, Peter.”</p>
<p>With a taunting glare that made him look more like himself, Peter stood and pushed off his sweatpants. He wasn’t wearing anything underneath, which Chris really should have expected in hindsight. He refused to react beyond extending an inviting arm. He’d seen Peter naked before, after all.</p>
<p>Peter still fit against his shoulder like he was made to be there.</p>
<p>Chris closed his eyes against that thought and let his hands go where they wanted to, caressing Peter’s arms and shoulders, running through his hair again. This was a terrible idea. He’d spent the past twenty years trying to get over Peter, to varying degrees of success. The fire and Peter’s coma had seemed like the final nails in the coffin of whatever hope he’d still had, and the way Peter had been avoiding him since he came back from the dead had sure looked like confirmation. He thought he was over it.</p>
<p>The way Peter molded himself to Chris’s side and threw a leg over him in distinctly proprietary fashion had everything roaring back to life in seconds. All Chris could do was breathe through it and hope he wasn’t giving too much away. This was just helping Peter out; it didn’t mean anything.</p>
<p>Eventually, Peter’s desperate tension melted away, but Chris could tell he wasn’t anywhere near sleep. “Do you want to actually tell me why half of Beacon Hills thinks of you as a kinky one-night stand?” he asked quietly.</p>
<p>Peter tensed up again, predictably, but released it with a sigh. “I don’t want to, no.”</p>
<p>“Will you anyway? I just… want to understand,” Chris said, like he had any right to request that anymore.</p>
<p>Peter closed his eyes, but didn’t move away. “It’s easier. If everything’s negotiated. They get what they want, I get what I need, everyone leaves happy.”</p>
<p>“Do you?” Chris prodded.</p>
<p>Peter snorted derisively. “You know me, Chris, I’ll flirt with anyone.”</p>
<p>Chris ran a hand down Peter’s back, and said carefully to the ceiling, “Flirt, yes. But I remember you being extremely opinionated about what made sleeping with someone worthwhile.”</p>
<p>“Well, I don’t exactly have that luxury right now,” Peter said acerbically. “Besides, there’s not a lot of sleeping happening during these encounters.”</p>
<p>Chris pinched him lightly on the side in response and then smoothed his hand over it. “You can sleep now.”</p>
<p>Peter pushed himself up on his elbow so he could look at Chris, trademark Hale eyebrow raised. “What if I don’t want to sleep?”</p>
<p>Chris spread his hands wide. “You don’t have to.”</p>
<p>Peter started to leer.</p>
<p>“But…”</p>
<p>“I knew this was a trap.”</p>
<p>“It’s not a trap. You just have to be willing to tell me what you want. No suggesting things you think I want to hear—you have to actually say what <em>you</em> want.”</p>
<p>Peter let his head fall back to Chris’s shoulder. “That’s the very definition of a trap.”</p>
<p>“Peter Hale, since when have you ever been reluctant to ask for what you want?” Chris asked incredulously, jostling Peter against his shoulder pointedly.</p>
<p>Instead of the sarcastic retort Chris was expecting, Peter rolled onto his back with a groan and scrubbed his hands over his face. “Why do you have to make this so <em>hard</em>?” He started to sit up, but grimaced at the lack of contact and turned back to half bury his face in Chris’s shoulder. “Look. My years in that coma aren’t very clear, but I wasn’t completely unaware either. I can’t… There were too many people moving me around when I was helpless and had no control of my body.”</p>
<p>“So you can’t have someone you don’t trust doing anything <em>to</em> you,” Chris said, making connections he wished he hadn’t.</p>
<p>“And when did I have time to rebuild that level of trust with anyone?” Peter’s arm tightened around Chris, radiating frustration. “This was the best solution. I could be in control and get what I needed.”</p>
<p>“And still keep them all at a distance,” Chris noted.</p>
<p>“Yeah, well.”</p>
<p>Chris stroked Peter’s arm until it relaxed, and finally voiced the question that had been hovering at the edges of this conversation the whole time. “Do you trust me?”</p>
<p>Peter didn’t say anything for a moment, but then: “I shouldn’t.”</p>
<p>Chris’s foolish heart leapt in his chest. “But?”</p>
<p>“But you’re here, aren’t you?”</p>
<p>Chris couldn’t help but wrap his arms around Peter and pull him in closer. “I am,” he said into the top of Peter’s head, lips pressed into his hair, inhaling the faint scent of shampoo that was nothing like what he used to use and the underlying notes that were still all Peter. He closed his eyes against the rush of emotion at such a stupid little thing and asked again, “What do you want?”</p>
<p>Peter turned his face into the side of Chris’s neck and drew in a breath, holding it for a moment before letting it out in a rush. “I want—I want to kiss and be kissed, to have sex without a negotiation beforehand because we already know all the ways the other person expresses desire, to have the luxury of taking everything slow… I want sex to not even be the point. I want it to feel like a natural evolution of circumstance, not some kind of end goal to be ticked off.” He dug a knuckle into Chris’s ribs. “I want love, goddammit, and I hate you for making me say all that out loud.”</p>
<p>Chris barely even flinched away from the sharp little pain in his side. At some point in the middle of that, he’d stopped breathing, because this, <em>this</em>, was the Peter Chris knew and no one else did. No one still alive, anyway.</p>
<p>He looked down at Peter and found him glaring at the bedroom wall in embarrassment and frustration—both largely foreign emotions to him, Chris knew. He ran a hand through Peter’s hair again. “You don’t have to talk anymore,” he said quietly.</p>
<p>A spark kindled in Peter’s eyes as he glanced back up at Chris, and then he was surging up over him, capturing Chris’s mouth in the kind of kiss he still remembered, one that had been burned into his soul at eighteen and that he’d been comparing all kisses to ever since: somehow sure and hungry and questioning and tender all at once. Peter kissed like it was a conversation. It was all Chris could do to answer back.</p>
<p>They didn’t stop for a very long time.</p><hr/>
<p>Later, back on the couch in less clothing and more comfortable positions, Chris reached out for some of the papers on the coffee table.</p>
<p>“Do you still want to move?”</p>
<p>Peter paused in his idle stroking of the tattoo on Chris’s chest. “Yes,” he said after a second. “There’s nothing left for me here anymore.”</p>
<p>Chris nodded thoughtfully. “What do you think about New York?”</p>
<p>Peter looked up at him in surprise, and then calculation. “I was actually leaning toward Paris.”</p>
<p>Chris shrugged. “Either works for me. I speak French, too.”</p>
<p>“You’d come with me?”</p>
<p>“Whatever you need. Just tell me what you want.”</p>
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